Field
One or more example embodiments relate to a system, device and/or method to facilitate compatibility between applications and data utilized therewith.
Description of Related Art
Applications, for example medical applications, may run in heterogeneous environments that utilize non-uniform vendor specific semantic data structures. These data structures may contain, for example, medical images, patient data, scanner protocols, medical data for business intelligence reports and dose management, etc.
Standards and regulations such as Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), attempt to standardize communication and data structures in the medical field. However, various factors (e.g., business needs, application features, and scanner protocols) may require changes to the applications before the aforementioned standards are updated, thus, leading to vendor specific dialects of a standard. Further, legacy scanners, picture archiving and communication system (PACS), and other data sources may have a relatively long lifecycle that results in some devices running according to antiquated versions of the aforementioned standards, which, in turn, may increase the variability in data structures. Therefore, conventionally, it may be difficult to add new features while ensuring that the system can continue to process existing data.